Meet Bob Perry

By Ben Smith

10/20/10 09:14 PM EDT

For all the talk of undisclosed money this cycle, it's notable how little attention the Republican Party's biggest donor has gotten.

Bob Perry, a Houston homebuilder and longtime underwriter of the Texas Republican Party, George W. Bush, and a host of conservative candidates, has given at least $11 million to Republican causes: $7 million reported today to American Crossroads and $4 million to the Republican Governors Association, whose IRS filing was made public earlier this week.

In the smaller scale world of hard political money, he's also given about $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, headed by Texan John Cornyn, and has given maximum contributions to about a dozen GOP Senate candidates, as well as $1,000 checks to two Texas Democrats.

He may also have given to groups that haven't yet, or won't ever, disclose their spending. He has, for instance, been a donor in the past to the Club for Growth.

Perry has long been a giant donor -- he spent $19 million on politics between 2003 and 2008, according to a USA Today tally -- and seems to have stepped up even that pace.

But Perry hasn't had the sort of media profile recently awarded to the Koch Brothers, though he did figure as a Democratic bogeyman when he underwrote the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on John Kerry.

Jonathan Martin points me to a rare Perry profile from 2006, by a Minnesota Public Radio reporter who wondered why he'd dropped $500,000 into a group backing Tim Pawlenty for Minnesota Governor -- despite the fact that Pawlenty and the head of the group reportedly didn't know Perry.

"He's kind of a reclusive character when it comes to interaction with the public and the media," Craig McDonald, with the watchdog group Texans for Political Justice, told MPR.

"Mr. Perry is really a lover of humanity and a patriot and believes quite passionately that the best thing to do to help the average American is for them to have a job," Perry spokesman Anthony Holm said. "And he believes that government plays a very significant role through taxation and job opportunity and reasonable tort reform to do that and he supports viewpoints that help each worker gain a job."